McDonald’s Gets Burned on Twitter

When Twitter and shortsighted corporate gestures collide, beautiful things can happen. Such was the case last week, when McDonald’s launched #MeetTheFarmers, a Twitter hashtag designed to promote the idea that the company uses fresh produce from actual farmers. Two hours later, someone at corporate decided to improve upon heartwarming testimonials from lettuce and potato suppliers by sending out a couple of tweets with the hashtag #McDStories. And that’s when things took a turn for the highly amusing.

Twitter users responded with plenty of McD stories—ones involving food poisoning, animal cruelty, projectile vomiting, Big Macs embedded with fingernails, and, in the case of one satisfied customer, the stirring revelation that “I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhea.”

Reacting to the, ahem, outpouring, Rick Wion, McDonald’s social media director, responded, “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.” Even if McDonald’s is changing its course, plenty of Twitter users are happy to stay right where they are: The #McDStories hashtag is still making the rounds, with no shortage of accompanying testimonials about instant conversions to vegetarianism, and worse. True democracy: lovin’ it!